Cyril Ramaphosa

Cyril Ramaphosa (17 November 1952-) was President of South Africa from 15 February 2018, succeeding Jacob Zuma. A former trade union and business leader, Ramaphosa served as Secretary General of the ANC from 1991 to 1997 and as its President from 2017.

Biography
Cyril Ramaphosa was born in Soweto, South Africa on 17 November 1952. He was a law student at the University of the North before becoming active in the South African Students' Organization, the Student Christian Movement, and the Balck People's Convention before gradually moving on to support the African National Congress. He became legal adviser to the Council of Unions of South Africa, and in 1982 was appointed general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers. Having co-founded the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in 1985, he led a strike involving over 200,000 miners in 1987. One of the most influential and prominent supporters of the ANC within South Africa during the 1980s, he became its secretary-general in 1991, but in 1994 failed in his bid to become Nelson Mandela's first Vice-President against the more moderate former ANC spokesperson in exile, Thabo Mbeki. He left the government in 1996 to take up the directorship of a leading black company.

In 2014, President Jacob Zuma appointed Ramaphosa Deputy President, and Ramaphosa marked himself as a committed socialist, a voice of Bantu-Afrikaner unity, and as an anti-corruption candidate. Following Zuma's 2018 resignation, Ramaphosa became President of South Africa, and he removed several corrupt Zuma cabinet members from office.